The Perils of Posting Scathing Reviews on Yelp and Angie's List

Have you ever had such a bad consumer experience that you were compelled to tell the world about it online on a customer-reviews site? I have. After spending a night at a rundown hotel outside a national park, I wrote this on a travel site: “Do not stay here if you can help it” because the place is “a dump (it even smelled like a toxic dump, at that).”

But reviewers, take heed: If you feel a civic duty to post a scathing screed, warning others to steer clear of a particular establishment, like a restaurant or a hotel, or a service provider, like a doctor or a home contractor, you could face a defamation suit.

Sued After Posting About Her Contractor

That’s what happened to Jane Perez, a homeowner in Fairfax, Va., after she wrote critically about her home contractor on Yelp and Angie’s List. The contractor sued for $750,000 in damages, saying Perez’s words were false and hurt his reputation.

The lawsuit is an eye-opener, providing a valuable lesson on how you should — and shouldn’t— post critical reviews about businesses and service providers online.

Eric Goldman, director of the Santa Clara University School of Law’s High Tech Law Institute, says the Perez case is “a reminder to us as review authors: There can be significant legal risk to sharing our views online.” Goldman says it’s one thing if you bash a business to a friend over coffee. But it’s quite another, legally, “when you start chatting over the Internet with a few million of your not-yet friends. Companies see these reviews and sometimes get testy.”

Here’s a shorthand version of Perez’s case, according to legal papers that were filed:

In 2011, she hired the Dietz Development contracting firm to make cosmetic repairs on her newly purchased townhouse. (The owner, Christopher Dietz, was a high-school classmate of Perez’s.) Perez thought the work was done far more slowly than promised and the quality was so poor that it “had to be redone by other contractors at great cost.” Perez says she discovered about $2,500 of her jewelry missing after firing Dietz and believed the company’s workers were responsible because the firm had her only extra key. Dietz sued Perez for nonpayment, but the suit was dismissed because he failed to file a “bill of particulars” in a timely fashion.

Perez then posted critical reviews about the contractor’s firm on Yelp and Angie’s List. Among other things, she wrote that she filed a police report “when I found my jewelry missing and Dietz was the only one with a key” and “Bottom line: Do not put yourself through this nightmare of a contractor.” She also noted that after Dietz tried to sue her for “monies due,” she won that case.

Dietz then sued Perez for $750,000 in damages, saying her views cost him $500,000 in harm to his reputation and seeking $250,000 in punitive damages. Denying stealing her jewelry and arguing that Perez won her suit due to a technicality, he also sought a preliminary injunction to make Perez take down her reviews pending a verdict.

In early December, a Fairfax County Circuit Court judge granted Dietz partial approval of the injunction, saying that although Perez’s reviews could remain up pending the outcome of a trial, she had to remove her accusation about the jewelry as well as her claim about winning the suit.

Perez then appealed to Virginia’s State Supreme Court, which quickly reversed the preliminary injunction, saying it “wasn’t justified.” (You can visit the Public Citizen site for details about the case.) Lessons From This Case

But the dispute is far from over. Dietz’s case against Perez is still pending and his attorney, Milton Johns, of Fairfax, Va., says his client intends to go forward with a jury trial, probably this fall. “What’s important to keep in mind,” Johns says, “is that just because you’re on the other side of a computer, the standard of the defamation law doesn’t change.”

Paul Alan Levy, an attorney for Public Citizen, says there’s a lesson here: “You have to be aware when you criticize a contractor that he may well decide he doesn’t like online criticisms and may sue you for defamation. So it’s important to be careful in what you say.”

Johns says his firm has been “getting a lot of calls from people with similar situations” — including a tailor, a marital arts instructor, a dentist and another contractor — who also want to bring cases after receiving scathing reviews.

Yelp says courts “have consistently ruled that consumers have the right to share their truthful experience.” That means, a spokeswoman wrote in an email, “reviewers are free to air their opinions, but should not exaggerate or misrepresent their experience.”

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*** 1/2 STARS Derick Wade and Caroline Mayer Just Checked Into The Hotel Horrid on Next Ave. If you’re a sensitive guy like myself. The kind of man who just wants to find a sweet gal who enjoys a dinner from the dollar menu and welcomes the idea of sharing a dirty hotel mattress with a bevy of blood hungry bed bugs, while not sweating the possible acute upper airway injury and neurological damage caused by toxic inhalation, well, I strongly suggest you steer clear of Ms. Mayer.

After awarding me the title of “The most tedious tight-wad she had ever met”, she raised her Black Satin Manolo Blahnik Sedaraby d’Orsay adorned foot and stomped down on my toes with the force of a grizzly bear ( I was wearing my Target sandals for goodness sake!). I was forced to wear a huge orthotic boot on my foot, to keep it immobilized for six weeks, but my pain only got worse (in my heel as well as my heart.). And although I have no factual proof of her theft, I discovered, after she roared out of the hotel room, that Twenty Five cents was missing from my Wrangler jeans.

Bottom line: Do not put yourself through the inevitable damage to the phalanges of your big toe or the tearing out of your heart. Avoid this nimble, narcotizing nightmare of a nymphet. In My Opinion, at least.

Call me Caroline (so Divine). I miss you. And have recovered full mobility in my foot. We could walk to the Sewage Treatment Facility (they have the most beautiful pools of thick green water), hunt for coins on the pavement and share a sandwich. Feel free to buy whatever type of bread, meat and condiments you prefer. And could you please cut the crust of mine?

I believe the work was done on the house in 2011 not 2010 according to the documents you linked to. Another thing is it looks like someone opened up the same complaint with poor quality, unfinished work in DC (Exhibit 12 on Public Citizen site) and Dietz was prosecuted by DC for not paying his workers (Exhibit 13). I really dislike a censor, especially one who seems to make it a habit of working over his clients.

i think you might be a boso….. how about home owners working over a contractor….. they need work done cheap they might not have the balance to pay the contractor… the contractor files a lien on the home.. the homeowner than files a neg. review with angies list and the BBB. is the contractor wrong for filing suit against homeowner?????? the court ordered a state home inspector to inspect the workmanship , the report came back and stated that the work was well above average workmanship , but homeowner still lied on angies list !!!!!!

These are called SLAPP suits, and are used routinely by wealthy individuals and corporations to silence critics

What Jane Perez encountered is nothing new. People in all walks of life have discovered that their exercise of their First Amendment right to freedom of expression may be followed by a lawsuit from someone or some business that they criticized.

For example, Oprah Winfrey said on her show in the 1990s that given the existence of mad cow disease, she wouldn’t choose to eat any more hamburgers. Beef sales plunged, and the Texas Beef Cattlemen’s Association sued her–not for libel, because she didn’t say something untrue, but for harming their sales of meat.

I asked Ralph Nader about the chilling effect this could have on statements of fact, and the American right to speak out. What would have happened if your book “Unsafe at Any Speed” on a car made by a Detroit automaker had been written in the current litigious environment? I asked. Would you have been sued? Or if your contemporary, Rachel Carson, had written “Silent Spring” in today’s world, would the chemical industry have sued her into silence? Or Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” about horrendous slaughterhouse conditions decades ago, would he have been sued?

Nader said I was on to something. In fact, he said, there is a movement on to chill citizens’ willingness to exercise their First Amendment rights, and this is something that must be stopped with countersuits, which Ms. Perez already has done. Nader said that Winfrey should countersue. I called her production company, Harpo Productions, and relayed his call for her to countersue, but she decided not to do that.

Nader also said that the increasingly widespread use of these SLAPP (Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation) suits has been chronicled by two faculty members at the University of Denver, George Pring and Penelope Canaan.

Nader told me to buy their book, SLAPPs–Getting Sued for Speaking Out. Available through the University of Denver bookstore, it is replete with innumerable examples of suits being used to silence critics.

According to Pring and Canaan, this problem will continue until people hit with SLAPP suits hit back with countersuits, to make those filing such suits realize that they are not in a position of having everything to gain and nothing to lose by bringing such legal actions.

a contractor in el paso filed suit against a member of angies list for stating facts that were not true. the member is sued for $135.000.00. contractor presented facts that the member did in fact lie. the case is still on going in el paso, tx county . in the mean time member had removed totaly his fffff rating and comments from angies list . I guess to medigate members losses, the neg. review is gone. now because of suing the member for lying on angies list , a contitutional right, angies list has removed contractor from the list of service providers. there is something immoral about writing a bad review about a contractor and hurting his buisiness. this case above is not over yet,, angies list is not protected by the CDA for acting in consert with member to hurt this contractor…. I think angies list will be next according to his lawyers in chicago who want to sue angie after this contractor prevails in state court. this case is much differant than any case that i have read about. ps this contractor did in fact sue this member in small claims court for moneys owed to contractor and the member paid the judgement in full according to docs now filed in state court You can sue a member for stating facts that are not true ………………….

People should not lie about others, and if they do, they deserve to be sued. They can post exactly what happened if they were mistreated.

My advice to business owners is that if you know who is posting lies about your business; expose the full name of the perpetrator and what they are doing. That information will show up in searches about them and eventually provide an incentive to stop.

Thanks for the informative post. I am a property investor. I love reading articles and blogs especially related to real estate. Actully I have invested on the property in Noida, The Aranya Project and would like to suggest to all, first of all, keep clear about the property then go with that.